Quote:
Originally Posted by opendoor
A couple of reasons. First, because of this gigantic caveat in those numbers:
When a forest is cut down for commercial use in BC, it's generally replanted very quickly, and those growing trees start to recapture the carbon that their predecessors released when used for fuel.
Secondly (and this is the bigger issue), trees aren't really a long-term carbon sink like fossil fuels are. If a tree is left in nature, eventually it'll die and rot, releasing its carbon. And any carbon it has stored over its life was already in the environment/atmosphere within relatively recent history. The only way wood is an effective carbon sink is if its harvested and used in durable products, but even then we're probably talking about a century at most, for most wood products/structures.
With fossil fuels on the other hand, when you burn them you're introducing carbon into the atmosphere that hasn't been part of the environment for millions of years. And if you don't burn it and it stays in the ground, it'll never enter the atmosphere.
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But I think most people acknowledge the next 50 or so years are going to be critical, and on that time scale most of what you mention is fairly irrelevant. If we are considering over hundreds of years, then yes, you could make the case for burning and replanting trees indefinitely. Burning natural gas results in far fewer emmisions today. Even coal is less. Since the problem is now, I think cutting and burning trees contributes to the problem, rather than solves it.